TACKLING SEO CHALLENGESIN 2020New strategies for keeping up with changes in search

Four ways to deal with opaque algorithms, bigger volumes of information, and more complex search results

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IntroductionStrategy #1:

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLSStrategy #2:

GET A BETTER OVERVIEW OF SITE STRUCTUREStrategy #3:

USE SOLUTIONS FOR BIG SITES AND BIG VOLUMES OF DATA

Strategy #4:DIVE INTO EXPERIMENTAL IDEAS & SEO PROGRAMMING

Data + SEO = Data SEOChanging SEO at OnCrawl

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INTRODUCTION

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INTRODUCTION

The year is 2020.

Search is getting (more) complicated.

Search engine algorithm changes are a black box, affecting sites without clear cause or explanation.

We find ourselves facing:• Increase in number of ranking factors and complexity of

algorithms.• Increase in SERP features.• Increase in data collected.• Increase in size of websites.• Increase in number of websites.

Let’s take a look at successful strategies you can use to deal with these changes.

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What does this mean for SEO?

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STRATEGY #1: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLS

STRATEGY #1

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLS

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STRATEGY #1: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLS

Google sets the example: Data Studio

More people are using Data Studio because it’s one of Google’s freely-available tools. With native connections to the Search Console, Analytics, and even YouTube, it connects easily to the basic tools of Google-oriented SEO work, and is fairly easy to use.

Many SEO audit tools, including OnCrawl, have released native Data Studio connectors, helping to improve audit summaries and monitoring solutions for SEOs.

Auditing reporting in Data Studio. Source: OnCrawl.

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STRATEGY #1: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLS

What’s more, audit data can now be combined with data from other sources for in-depth analysis.

The SEO community has shared many templates for great insights:• Tracking market trends• Tracking daily keyword movement• Viewing SEO traffic• ...

https://www.aleydasolis.com/en/search-engine-optimization/google-update-analysis-search-console-data-studio-report-template/

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STRATEGY #1: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLS

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/forecast-seo-data-studio/311579/

https://www.mrjonathanjones.com/2018/12/20/google-data-studio-alternative-report-to-google-search-console/

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STRATEGY #1: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLS

STRATEGY #2

GET A BETTER OVERVIEW OF SITE STRUCTURE

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STRATEGY #2: GET A BETTER OVERVIEW OF SITE STRUCTURE

Internal linking

Linking--and therefore the site structure created by internal links--is one of the central means of improvement. However, predicting the impact of big changes can be difficult without the right information.

Chris Green has looked at methods for confronting his expectations and testing the actual impact of changes on a website by using OnCrawl’s Inrank. Inrank measures the on-site PageRank of each page on a scale of 0 to 10, and an updated algorithm to provide page popularity analysis that is better founded and closer to what Google likely examines on a website.

He found that, for some sites, not all improvements drove the same increase in Inrank, and even found some surprises. He discussed his methodology in a recent ebook and at BrightonSEO’s Crawl and Indexation summit in September.

Judging the impact of internal linking changes is notoriously difficult… And we make too many changes without testing.

— Chris Green

Download the full ebook

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STRATEGY #2: GET A BETTER OVERVIEW OF SITE STRUCTURE

Grouping pages for improved analysis

Site structure should also reflect the purposes of your pages, their templates and classifications.

The more we talked with SEOs, the more we found that how you group your pages makes the biggest difference in a successful versus a frustrating analysis.

Based on workshops and feedback, OnCrawl has realized

that SEOs need more than just a segmentation feature to do impactful work. You need multi-level categories, intuitive navigation, and a library of suggestions.

You should be able to switch between a view of your site depth by page template… and by load time… and by on-SERP rank… and more.

The better the view of your site you can give yourself, the more pertinent the trends you will be

Studying the impact of site linking changes on page depth and Inrank (internal PageRank).Source: Chris Green, “How your internal linking scheme affects Inrank”.

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STRATEGY #1: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLS

STRATEGY #3

USE SOLUTIONS FOR BIG SITES AND BIG VOLUMES OF DATA

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STRATEGY #3: USE SOLUTIONS FOR BIG SITES AND BIG VOLUMES OF DATA

We all know that one of the hallmarks of SEO today is the volume of data available. As sites grow exponentially, so does the amount of data we need to process to understand, predict, and improve performance on search engines.

Big sites

The bigger your site, the more challenges you face when auditing:• Is your SEO crawler fast enough or will it take months to crawl

your site?• Is your crawler’s analysis based on big-data algorithms or will

indexing your billions of internal links freeze the whole process?

Auditing big sites doesn’t have to be a challenge. Source: OnCrawl.

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STRATEGY #3: USE SOLUTIONS FOR BIG SITES AND BIG VOLUMES OF DATA

Even if you can answer «yes» to questions like this, there is always room for improvement.

For example: although crawl speed and big data algorithms have been key parts of the OnCrawl universe since the beginning, we’ve recently increased crawl-over-crawl comparison calculations and gained more than 10x in speed.

The big picture

Data visualization tools and data platforms are key to turning data points into accessible, actionable business plans.

And if we want to make the point that SEO is an essential part of any strategic business strategy, SEO data needs to be present in business intelligence analyses.

Even faster crawl comparisons, even for big sites. Source: OnCrawl.

That’s why connectivity with key BI solutions, like Power BI and Tableau, and with machine learning data platforms, like Dataiku, is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.

But what if your business intelligence and data analysis doesn’t use a big-name platform? You still need full access to your SEO data: fast, full, and reliable exports for cloud-based storage like Google Bucket or Amazon S3.

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STRATEGY #1: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLS

STRATEGY #4

DIVE INTO EXPERIMENTAL IDEAS & SEO PROGRAMMING

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STRATEGY #4: DIVE INTO EXPERIMENTAL IDEAS & SEO PROGRAMMING

One of the most important--and controversial--movements in SEO right now is the trend of using programming skills and machine learning for marketing purposes.

Many SEOs are eagerly learning Python, creating Jupyter Notebooks, digging into how

browsers create web pages (and how to manipulate them for SEO purposes after the page has been provided by the server), experimenting with GPT-2 and GPT-3, and other exploits that are pretty opaque to the average marketer and internet user.

Do you need to keep up?

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STRATEGY #4: DIVE INTO EXPERIMENTAL IDEAS & SEO PROGRAMMING

It’s a tough question.

At OnCrawl, we made the decision to share much of our R&D work in its early stages to help people without research skills get access to some of the experimental techniques (and technologies) that are changing the face of SEO--long before they hit the market.

It’s hard to deny the advantages that machine learning can provide for SEO, from accurately forecasting future traffic, to automatic, quality content creation, to detecting changes in performance in real time.

Many of these practices are well on their way to becoming part of mainstream SEO, whether you are experimenting in the front lines, adapting code others make available, relying on your more data-oriented coworkers, or waiting for these features to be developed and included in mainstream tools.

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STRATEGY #1: TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ACCESSIBLE NEW TOOLS

DATA + SEO= DATA SEO

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DATA + SEO = DATA SEO

I have no doubt that data science will become a strong asset for every digital marketer, especially SEO specialists. This technology makes reliable decisions based on actual data possible, bringing a

real competitive advantage to all companies that use it.

— Vincent TerrassiProduct Director @OnCrawl

All of these point to a new direction in SEO in the 2020s:

data-driven SEO.

Data is the bridge between SEO as a marketing task and SEO as a strategic business lever.

In 2020, we’ve already seen it used to predict market trends when old strategies failed, to pilot complex migrations, to outpace competitors on intent-based search queries, to improve collaboration and earn project buy-ins, and to drive revenue you can rely on.

SEO data is not limited to audits, SERPs, and links, but covers the whole ecosystems of language, business, and your industry.

If you’re a fan of data in SEO, stay tuned. We have great things coming soon!

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STRATEGY #2: GET A BETTER OVERVIEW OF SITE STRUCTURE

CHANGING SEO AT ONCRAWL

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CHANGING SEO AT ONCRAWL

Like the SEOs that use it, OnCrawl as an SEO platform is ready to take on the new SEO:

OnCrawl 2020 Timeline

January 2020x10 improvement in Crawl-over-Crawl comparison performances

March 2020Big Data Export available in beta for all OnCrawl data in Google Bucket et Amazon S3

May 2020Data Studio connector in public beta

July 2020OnCrawl connector for Dataiku released

September 2020Data Studio connector release

Coming soonLive log monitoring

February 2020Improvements to the Inrank algorithm to

match Google’s PageRank

June 2020Templates for Power BI and

Tableau Software released

August 2020New Data Science project for OnCrawl Labs:

Long Tail Prediction

Coming in October 2020New Segmentation Explorer:

Multi-level segmentations, new UI

Data science solution release:OnCrawl Genius

April 2020OnCrawl Labs released

Start your free trial

hello@oncrawl.comwww.oncrawl.com